Tom Law

Now that the 4th of the July holiday weekend is in the books, it’s time to commence the serious countdown. Del Mar comes first, in exactly 10 days. Saratoga follows a little more than a week later and in 18 days, or so says the chalkboard on a front porch in Saratoga Springs. (Full disclosure, the chalkboard is on the porch of this writer).

New Grade 1 winners by Hard Spun and Include emerged last weekend while there was a heavy dose of Proud Citizen in the pedigrees of juvenile stakes winners in North America.

Malibu Moon shined brightest during last weekend’s stakes action with a pair of new stakes winners and another out of one of his daughters.

Joe Clancy’s column “My sons want to go to a funeral,” the most heavily read piece at thisishorseracing.com in 2014, was honored as one of last year’s best pieces of equine journalism by the American Horse Publications at the organization’s annual awards banquet Saturday in San Antonio, Texas.

The unsung Birdstone sired another Grade 1 winner last weekend and the Scat Daddy juveniles continue to fly out of the sale ring, one right into the winners’ enclosure at Royal Ascot.

The days were counting down to Cash Crop’s first start over hurdles and Arch Kingsley Jr. identified a problem. He also came up with a solution, one that was as much about horsemanship as it was about improvisation and maybe even a little innovation.

The week before American Pharoah’s triumph in the Belmont Stakes, Bob Baffert’s chief assistant Jimmy Barnes, alongside stable pony Smokey, walked American Pharoah off the track after a light clockwise jog. Every morning since his arrival to Churchill Downs several people from the racing press stopped by to get an update on how the Triple Crown hopeful was doing and would typically get the obligatory “he did very well this morning” response.

As the horses took to the track for the fifth race Saturday at Churchill Downs I started to get déjà vu. In the hundreds of races I’d seen under the twin spires, none pronged the attention of the loyal Louisville fan base quite like that of the Kentucky Derby. But this was different.